All of the theories on the death of Facebook are all based on the premise that Facebook won't pivot. That the only way out is to monetize mobile. If you asked me 10 years ago, I could've never predicted AWS or the Kindle, but look at Amazon today.
Exactly. It's not as if everybody left the "good ship facebook" on autopilot. With the amount of cash they have now, they could easily develop / acquire hardware, create another paypal, replicate "google apps for business" or even Android. What about a facebook ISP or even global telecom provider ? Hell, they could even fund a facebook OS.. I'm not saying any of these is a good idea but they really do have some resources (ie $$$) behind them now.
This mass hysteria about FB flopping and calling buyers suckers just makes me want to buy more of their stock. Why? Because the majority rarely gets it right when it comes to something as volatile as stocks. Same goes for media and other "experts."
AWS and Kindle make up just over 1 percent of Amazon's annual revenue. The theories of Facebook's death are based on the premise that they are promising to discover a grand new revenue giant in the near future, which is a bit of a stretch in many people's eyes.
In a way Amazon is an absurd object lesson - their P/E ratio isn't far from double Facebook's and Facebook was five times as profitable as Amazon last quarter. If anything, Amazon shows that as long as you're profitable and retain a controlling stake in the company, the media's and Wall Street's much-vaunted expectations aren't worth a damn.
P/E isn't everything since earnings can fluctuate for a lot of reasons. Amazon's market cap is only about twice their annual revenue, compared to 28x for facebook.
But I think you have to admit that there's an expectation built into Amazon's market cap that they will eventually find a way to improve their margins.
Compare HP, whose market cap is around 1/3 annual revenue at the moment.
Not necessarily. AWS and Kindle/eBooks are already proven businesses with high margins, if the current growth rate on those businesses is maintained then the overall profit margin across all Amazon will improve. And in both cases Amazon is the leader in those fields (PaaS and eBooks). Also, Amazon has been spending a lot of money lately on expansion and hiring, once that's stabilized their profit will go up as well. Overall I'd say the bet that AWS, Kindle, and Amazon's retailing business will sustain double digit growth rates over the next several years is a pretty safe bet.
Also you need to factor in that Amazon has about $25 billion in assets, so their net market cap is only about $75 billion. Anyone looking at Amazon's revenue growth and the diversified foundations of that company can't be too upset at the seemingly high P/E ratio of AMZN. Facebook is also growing revenue like crazy, but their market is much different and there are a lot of open questions on whether or not they can maintain that growth (or even retain their user base). That doesn't mean that facebook is a bad investment, it just means that there's a lot of risk there and the stock price doesn't seem to reflect any of that risk.
Consider: Yahoo has nearly as many users as Facebook (700 mil vs 900 mil), higher total revenue, just as many experienced developers, and a similar business model (ads). Almost all of facebook's valuation lies at the feet of their reputation, not at any sound business fundamentals, and that's a pretty big burden.
I think you're missing the point. Even without AWS or kindle amazon's business was growing like crazy, and for good reason. The same goes for google too. The problem with facebook's stock is that the valuation is based on the successful completion of an as yet hypothetical pivot.
Yes, they may succeed, but pivots at that scale are risky, and there's no margin for risk built into the facebook share price. That's a problem.
The article proposes that the ad-supported web will collapse along with FB after prices have dropped to beyond unsustainable ... what would the post-ad web look like? I'm looking forward to all the content farms, endless plagiarism, and constant attention-seeking going away; what else will happen?
I haven't a clue but both CL and, for some reason, the São Paulo gov't banning outdoor adverts come to mind (perhaps the world gov't one day will ban all ads everywhere). Also Star Trek where you'd do things because you are good at them and wish to contribute to society, no money needed.
If I can send a message to anyone I know or have met (in real-time, asychronously, or by video), who will receive it on their phone or computer immediately, without having to remember a number or address, I'd call that earth-changing.
I don't know if Facebook will be a successful business, or if more convenient ways of communicating will appear in the future, but the ability to let me easily communicate with all my friends and family is as earth-changing as I'm going to need it.
In that aspect Skype is no different: sender and receiver need an account, you need to know whatever the FB name is of whoever you're messaging, you have to have an app (mobile app or browser) running on your device to be aware of the message. Main difference in messaging is Skype doesn't allow you to message offline users, I think.
It does. My group of friends use it as a pure text IM system; crazy as it seems, it works better than anything else we've tried (e.g. if you're signed into Jabber from two devices, messages for you will only go to one of them).
Skype and Facebook are very close to each other.
Skype powers Facebook video chat and you can use FB in the Skype client. Also Skype is owned by Microsoft, arguably Facebook's biggest ally.
Many people suggest we're in a bubble, and usually call it a social media bubble. I still find myself wondering if we aren't in an advertising bubble instead, with social media a rider and not a driver per se of the trend. Advertising is and always shall be a very important part of the economy, but there's also this sharp bound on exactly how much money it can move around since it needs to result in net profit for the advertiser. Google definitely has demonstrated they have a superior platform. I'm not sure anybody else has. Not just Facebook, anybody else.
If there's any element of this bubble that reminds me of the previous it is that there are still an awful lot of startups out there who are trying to simply acquire as many users as possible with vague plans to figure out how to make money later... and they all seem to come up with the same, "Uh... shove ads at them, I guess?" plan in the end.
There definitely is -- and it may still be too early to say "was" -- a period of social media advertising frenzy among Fortune 500 companies in the last few years. Until fairly recently (with GM's $30M pullout of Facebook advertising the most visible harbinger). Now the honeymoon is just about over, and with it will go the easy money that had basically been throwing itself at Facebook's heels. Facebook in specific, and social advertising in general, will have to find a way to deliver actual results in line with people's sky-high expectations. And they'll have to do it soon. This won't be easy, given that Facebook's ad sales teams have spent the last 3+ years promising the moon to F500 marketing and advertising execs.
But why were all these advertisers so willing to be wooed in the first place?
Because there's a very real (and growing) hole in the advertising landscape. With the erosion of TV advertising as a reliable way to generate mass impressions at scale, advertisers are anxious to find a replacement. TV is still the largest advertising vechicle, by media spend, for most F500 companies (if not all of them?). But premiums on TV are growing each year, even while total ratings are declining, audiences are dispersing (both across networks and onto other platforms), and ads are basically avoidable. While the bloom was on the Facebook rose, it seemed like a hell of a savior to people desperately seeking one.
The fallacy underpinning the leap from TV onto the Facebook bandwagon was the assumption that social media could be bought, and advertised on, in pretty much the same way as TV. In reality, the advertiser needs to be much more savvy and sophisticated about social advertising. He needs to worry about more than just reach, frequency, and CPMs. He'll need to consider the quality of his content, refresh rates for content, geo-targeting and context-targeting, the relevancy algorithms powering his anticipated reach and engagement figures, and the micro-segments to which he serves different ads at different times. Instead, right now he's spent the last few years simply throwing giant checks at Facebook and expecting TV reach, impressions, etc.
I'd consider both parties at fault here: the advertisers for being naive, and Facebook for playing to the deep-pocketed suckers. Picking the low-hanging fruit, in this case, may have set back Facebook's credibility within the advertising community for quite some time. And it also set expectations that Facebook wasn't, and still isn't, prepared to meet. (In fairness, I'm sure Facebook received a great deal of pressure to take the easy ad money in order to make its books look as attractive as possible in anticipation of the IPO).
Bear in mind a bubble doesn't imply that there's no opportunity, or even that there's no revolution. The ~2000 bubble wasn't a bubble because it was wrong, the Internet has revolutionized pretty much everything that we thought it was going to, and continues to do so. It just didn't do it at quite the promised pace, and wasn't able to sustain that much investment, that quickly, nor did it necessarily take the shape that everybody at the time was convinced it would.
So when I say we seem to be in an advertising bubble, it's not a statement that there isn't a revolution in advertising coming that somebody is going to profit from, it's a statement that it isn't coming at the pace people like Facebook are promising, nor can it sustain that level of investment profitably. I did make sure to call out Google for having legitimately advanced the field. If the bubble pops they'll get hit, but I have every confidence they'll survive and thrive, because they definitely have real value, just as Amazon has survived and thrived after the last bubble.
(I expect somewhere in the 5-15 years time frame there's going to be a robotics bubble too, and it won't be because robots that can coexist with us in our houses and streets won't be every bit as revolutionary as the hype claims, it just won't be revolutionary as quickly as the investment would require.)
"a bubble doesn't imply that there's no opportunity, or even that there's no revolution"
I don't disagree.
"So when I say we seem to be in an advertising bubble, it's not a statement that there isn't a revolution in advertising coming that somebody is going to profit from, it's a statement that it isn't coming at the pace people like Facebook are promising, nor can it sustain that level of investment profitably."
Again, I think we're in complete agreement here.
"If the bubble pops they'll get hit, but I have every confidence they'll survive and thrive, because they definitely have real value, just as Amazon has survived and thrived after the last bubble."
True, which may actually make Google a fantastically cheap buy if the ad bubble pops and they take a momentary hit. Their fundamentals are solid and aren't going away anytime soon -- unless, of course, Facebook gets its act together and cannibalizes Google's ad dollars. While I think that's distinctly possible -- and Google has been anxious about it for years -- it seems that the threat isn't as immiment as once expected. The threat still exists, however. And maybe, in a weird way, the recent fiasco with Facebook's IPO will actually buy Facebook some "air cover" for awhile -- allowing it to develop killer ad products under the radar, surprising everyone with their rollout. (I think this must be the thesis of anyone still holding onto Facebook stock right now).
Advertising student. Advertising's not in a bubble; some very rich and formerly successful advertisers are just doing an awful job at adjusting to the change in society that's now been twenty years in the making. Dumbasses.
Here's how advertising works from its creator's point of view. There are a few principles abstract enough that you can apply to any piece of advertising. Good advertising positions itself within a market, develops a brand image, establishes its product as a good product (not even necessarily better-than: as long as you look trustworthy and people know your name, you'll sell). The bulk of ad research, meanwhile, goes into studying individual forms. TV ads. Product placement in films. Radio spots. Magazine spots. There's a series of long-tested techniques which advertisers rely on. Even these techniques usually fail, because plenty of advertisers are fucking idiots who don't get that ads are a creative medium, and if you're formulaic rather than creative, you'll sell jack shit.
The challenge of the Internet is that every web site has its own unique form. Most of these forms weren't even designed for ads (Facebook at least knew how they wanted to sell ads; Twitter still has no clue). To sell on Twitter is different from selling on Facebook is different from selling on Reddit or Tumblr or Pinterest or Instagram. There's no formula. And some of these sites are so limited that advertisers simply have no clue how to push their shitty little message out to suckers, ahem, consumers.
The fix, of course, is that instead of selling a brand you start interesting conversations, create dialogues that engage people with the thing you're selling, even start communities of people who revolve around your product. But advertisers aren't bright enough or genuine enough or ambitious enough to do this the right way. Community-building especially: nobody wants to join a forum for a product that isn't a car. Yet some people persist in thinking that if they build it, fans will come.
One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly. One's the model Facebook is still struggling with: connect super-small businesses with precisely the people who want to buy their product. These anti-Facebook ads stories recently only show that you have to be smarter advertising on Facebook than you'd have to be in a newspaper. The really good Facebook ads get friends talking about them, because they really are something that those people enjoy. But that runs counter to how advertisers think about their sheep, goddammit I mean targets, no wait that doesn't sound nice either.
The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people. That means fewer start-ups designed to sucker people into wanting some bullshit connection they never really needed (YC has some exactly like this), fewer advertisers looking down at the masses like they're ripe for the picking, fewer businesses geared toward herding people up and selling them wholesale. The more freedom you give people w/r/t how they consume media and how they express themselves, the harder it is to trap them in your crap. Ultimately it becomes more profitable to just treat them like human beings, and act like a human yourself. But plenty of products will die when this happens because plenty of products were never intended for human consumption in the first place.
Personally I think the problem isn't people doing an awful job, it's attention. On the TV they frequently interrupt your program but you'll endure it as the content is longer than the ad. Same with Radio. In Magazines and Papers they constantly jiggle around all the content so you have to at least scan the page to see if it's an advert or an article which means they have at least a chance to grab your attention.
Web ads cannot grab your attention because the content they surround is bite-sized so any attempt to interrupt is so much more jarring. They tried a few different ways and generally they failed. The worst new one is the put an ad in the middle of the text, but that too is incredibly jarring and confusing. Another example is the attempt to monetize funny videos by putting a 15 sec ad clip in front of it. But quite often this is as long as the content! Do people even try and endure the ad? I'd love to see the numbers. If I click play on a random video and an ad starts I usually skip to the next article rather than watch the ad.
Also when you get into something like Facebook the adverts sit in the same place every time. Which you learn to skip automatically very quickly as you're usually not interested in them. You never have to play hunt the article apart from the very occasional site that has the full page popups which generally means you will start avoiding that site.
But worse for advertisers, if they make them too intrusive people can just turn them off. Brilliant!
The only ad I've recently seen that made me think, hmm, this could work are the occasional full page background adverts they run on IMDB.
Also Facebook didn't used to have ads, they just added them to the side of the page at one point. And I doubt the future of ads does look like the Deck Network, it's just another advertising network. They seem to be teaching some strange ideas at your college, I'd be interested to see the data that backs it up.
I agree with you about background ads. They are on the Hype Machine also and it works brilliantly. It is tougher to put into numbers because I am less likely to click on it, but I take notice of the brand and the creativity/style. It is tough for big brands to put themselves into places like Facebook ads because they are so restricted creatively.
I also think YouTube is onto something with the skippable ads. If the ad is interesting enough to catch your attention in the first 5 seconds, you watch it. Not very intrusive and an opportunity for me to watch a movie trailer and forces brands to do something super creative.
The comparison of Facebook ads (web ads in general) to newspapers competing for small local businesses is right on.
> Deck Network, it's just another advertising network
Doesn't seem so to me. I always run Adblock, but after looking around a bit at some DECK-served sites (there's a list on http://decknetwork.net/), I might whitelist their ads. They seem unobtrusive and mindfully-designed.
You seem to be saying that advertising networks could never work, but don't back that up with data (which, ironically, is what you're asking unalone for).
> the occasional full page background adverts they run on IMDB
I hate those. They ruin a consistent website experience, and then piss me off when I accidentally click the giant margins. The AV Club does this also - or used to, I don't know, I blocked 'em.
I'm not saying they're a bad ad network or intrusive. I just mean their ads are functionally exactly the same as everyone elses. Their ethics doesn't make them more effective.
I actually meant alternative explanation to the parent's observation that all advertisers seemingly have suddenly all become idiots.
The genius of google's ads is that they can be so much different. When you search for something targeted ads are far more common to be relevant and useful. Facebook is still struggling with its ad technology and paradigm, and right now they have a very clunky, old fashioned system. Throw ads in the user's face, collect money. The principle being that a well made ad can get someone to buy something they didn't want to buy before. But that's the old and busted way of doing things. It's the way that shows adult diaper ads to 20 year olds, and baby diaper ads to 60 year olds.
It's based on the premise that you can auction off people's attention to the highest bidder. And to some degree yes, that still does work, a little. In the 21st century there are better ways. The best "advertising" is not recognizable as advertising at all. It's greasing the wheels of people buying something they already want. If you look at amazon, for example, they have the recommendations system, an extensive product review system, and a referral system. All of these are there to help guide people into buying something. Amazon is best served when a customer buys something they actually want, as is google. It strengthens their brand and deepens user engagement. This is precisely what facebook needs to be doing but haven't, partly because unlike with google, any degree of advertising is intrusive on the experience of using facebook. And if they get into the cycle of just dumping more and more generic, "attention auction" ads on their users then they will have failed. People will merely ignore the ads or they will spend their time elsewhere if the site becomes too obnoxious to use.
Nothing in your essay has anything to do with advertising not being a bubble. Sure, it depends on your definition of "bubble," but in the sense that I imagine most people understand it (over-hyped marketplaces leading to inflated, unsustainable valuations), you didn't refute nor address the concept at all.
In fact, a lot of your post could be used to support jerf's point. The methodologies that you're saying are worthless actually have huge advertising budgets behind them. Inflated value over true, intrinsic value = bubble.
Also, this statement:
>> "One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly."
This goes without saying, but click's aren't the intrinsic value of ads. There has to be a transaction at some point for the value to be justified from the advertisers standpoint. It's actually pretty ironic that in your shining example about advertising's golden future, you stop short of the true value of advertising.
>>"The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people."
i was recently at a party, near Vienna, Austria. lots of thirty somethings, all educated, various jobs.
i asked a simple question: has anyone of you clicked on a digital ad? ever?
no one. now, of course, sample size, anecdote, yaddayadda. i never clicked on an ad (hell, i block them). no one i know clicks on them. the only time people really get "engaged" by an ad is when it is annoying - everyone has a hateful story about those.
is there really tangible, hard evidence that online ads lead to actual sales? and if so, who the heck are the people actually clicking on them?
I'm pretty sure that admitting this will make me uncool, but I like ads.
Not the annoying ones mind you, it your ad interrupts me, you deserve to be punished. My time is precious to me.
However, if your ad just sits there, off to the side or at the top of the page or whatever (or off-web, in a billboard, or poster or display at the store, whatever) I'm ok with it. See, what that does it notify me of the existence of things. Many of those things are actually useful to my life. By keeping me up to date of what exists, I can be far more efficient when it comes time to deal with problems, wants and needs. In the least useful case, I can at least know who does the things I am looking to get done. In the most useful case, I will be aware that there are tools to solve a problem I may have otherwise spent days on (or even given up on solving and worked around). This saves me time and effort. I am OK with that. Seriously, how else would I go about finding something I didn't know existed without tons of effort otherwise -- I probably wouldn't even know to look for it.
I really don't understand the anti-ad people. Oh no! Someone is trying to sell you something... the horror. Oh no, you haven't spent 30s teaching yourself to not be distracted by something shiny, way to waste your human capability to learn.
It regularly turns out on google that the ad links are exactly what I am looking to buy, so I click and give everyone the conversion, because honestly, it doesn't hurt me to do so, and keeps this amazingly useful tool that is "good search" available to me at no additional cost.
Whatever, I'm probably below average intelligence, and am one of the dumb folks that doesn't magically understand every single thing in existence via pure thought, and must be informed instead.
"is there really tangible, hard evidence that online ads lead to actual sales? and if so, who the heck are the people actually clicking on them?"
Yes, 20 and 30 somethings click on ads all the time, but they tend not to look like ads. Ads that come up in google searches are typically highly relevant, so plenty of people click on them. And various forms of advertisement such as amazon referral links and such-like which represent buying suggestions from trusted friends.
If advertisers are reduced to "making communities around products", does that mean we can look forward to manufacturers driving sales by increasing the value provided by their products?
Also, if you have to be smarter to effectively advertise on Facebook, isn't that a sign that they are charging too much?
I like the TR article and I like this comment. Both are the voice of reason. I also think it will fall of deaf ears. Too many programmers think they are smarter than everyone else, e.g. those in advertising. They believe they can control and manipulate people as consumers the same way they control and manipulate them as software end-users. They believe gaining a large number of users equates to success in business. It does not. And Facebook will be history's great example. The article explains what makes Google's business work (Overture; Yellow Pages style advertising) and points out Facebook has nothing comparable. But some programmers just want to pretend this does not matter.
I'm excited at the possibilities that will arise after the fall of Facebook and the decline of web advertising.
One trouble with advertising is that narcissism drives certain people and organizations to pay way too much for it.
If you own a small business, for instance, it's incredibly gratifying to hear ads for your business on the radio. It makes you feel good about yourself. It makes it hard to make a rational calculation that spending $X on ads brings in $Y more profit, and that $Y > $X. Even if you're rational, there's some other guy who's not who is going to drive up rates.
Many big companies spend heavily, even buy TV networks, so they can bombard the public with "feel good" messages that don't have a clear role in a conversion funnel. For instance, GE bought NBC and you can't go five minutes without seeing some ad trying to convince people that GE is this great innovative company trying to save the Earth -- although generally the products involved aren't for retail sale and the only rational purpose for these ads, at best, is an effort to influence the political climate. What's the ROI on that?
Google ads have started to puncture this bubble because once you have advertising that's measurable, it's hard to justify the expense for something that's not.
I still find myself wondering if we aren't in an advertising bubble instead, with social media a rider and not a driver per se of the trend.
I'd go a step beyond that and say if there is any bubble, it is based on a large number of people targeting market share of a market with a fairly constant size, advertising spend.
Everytime you add a company trying to get advertising dollars, those dollars have to come from some other company and making advertising more efficient doesn't nessisarily mean Cheif Marketing Officers will increase marketing spend.
Here's a catchy name for the ad bubble - we could call it "advertising-supported software." Or, for short, ASS.
Google isn't ASS, because Google ads aren't really ads. They're more like the shelf slots that Safeway sells to food vendors. Google is a store - the world's biggest store, browsed by full-text search.
(In fact, if I was Goog, I'd separate the UI into two intents, with a radiobutton or something: either you're shopping, or you're searching for information. The latter is a free, spamless service that supports the former.)
I think FB will have to learn to make its money the old-fashioned way - by providing valuable services. FB is a valuable service - it makes $5 per user a year, from ads. How many FB users would drop the service if they had to pay $5 a year? And how many other services can FB add? Dropbox anyone? Dropbox isn't ASS...
Advertising is a crappy way of funding services. It chiefly exists because of payment friction. Startups are supposed to be the future. Is crap the future? Is your project ASS? Great, but have a plan to exit before the ASS bubble pops. Some of us remember the first era of "eyeball valuation"...
Facebook Connects the world...almost everybody i meet is there and i can write messages from my phone to them for free.
Add to that their giant app platform for games and entertainment stuff. Soon you will be able to Pay with Facebook Credits everywhere...i think they have plenty of ways to go apart from advertising.
By now, they've clearly shown us that their main game will be display ads. The history of other public web companies tells us that anything else added on will be small incremental improvements compared to the display ads.
(1) I don't think that digital ads are less effective than old TV and Newspaper advertising. In the bad old days, nobody could measure the impact of advertising and people assumed ads were worth more than they are.
Once it became possible to measure the effectiveness of transactional ads online, it became a lot harder to justify the cost of display ads.
The advertising apocalypse won't just affect the internet, it will affect traditional media. On the few cases where I watch cable or OTA TV I'm shocked that the ads are 5-10% relevant to me -- it seems like much of the industry is kept alive by ambulance-chasing lawyers, credit repair services and the medicare economy.
(2) Facebook has other ways to make money, and in a pinch, they'll develop them -- it's believable that they could increase revenue 2-3x in a year or two if they really had to... Largely because they haven't had intense pressure to increase revenue. Facebook Credits, for instance, could be a gold mine if you could buy more things with them.
Everyone always seems to talk about Facebook for payments.
Am I the only one that finds this hard to believe? Why is Facebook in a good position to authorize payments? They have very few credit cards on file. Besides FarmVille, et al, who exactly is giving their credit card info to Facebook?
In what context am I supposed to use Facebook to pay for things? If we're talking about mobile, then we're talking about smartphones. What exactly makes you think Google/Apple are going to lay down and give the keys to the mobile payment castle to Facebook? Google and Apple already have our credit card info, we all already buy things through Apple and Google, and it is a logical step that I would use that same process for buying something with my smartphone in a store.
I don't think it is a logical step for me to pull out my smartphone, open my Facebook app and use it to pay for something, anymore than it makes sense to use my Twitter app to pay, or Instagram for that matter.
In fact, if we're going to use a third party app to pay for things, I have an app from my bank, why not use that?
I just don't see Facebook getting in to mobile payments...
Go to Home Depot. You can now make PayPal mobile payments.
You're going to use your bank for payments because you already have low-cost ways to make payments already (ie. checks, debit and credit cards).
But... there are millions of people in the US who operate outside of the banking system. They are mostly poor or working off the books in some form. For these folks, the idea of buying a $100 topoff card at a gas station to have access to mobile payments makes sense. How do I know this? Becuase the same folks are paying $5 for a disposable debit card today.
I picture a payments system on Facebook being geared to person-to-person payments and web payments, not in store, mobile payments. Need to pay back a friend for dinner, split the rent, pitch in for a co-workers gift? FB is a natural place. These type of payments could make people very used to paying with FB as well, potentially opening the door for use in more traditional payment scenarios. Year after year I've been surprised that nothing like this has emerged on FB.
The contact list, consumer trust, and appropriate context. A third-party developer offering this has the significant challenge of making users trust them with a payment. People know Facebook and (most) trust them. PayPal or Bump are options, but are distanced from social interactions. I'd be interested to see the usage numbers from younger consumers, as I also imagine (with no data to back me up) that not many teenagers or college students use PayPal. As for cash, again it's an option, but it's pretty clear the world is going plastic. There's a reason Square is a big deal.
Here are some opportunities:
Social graph is their biggest asset. 900million users.
A number of companies have been built only because of this network. I can easily see them charging large sites in the future.
Spotify, Pinterest, Tumblr are just a few companies using the social graph to build better products and all of them are billion dollar companies using Facebook for free.
Google maps now charges large sites for API calls, Bing is now charging for API calls. Facebook will too.
Payments is an amazing opportunity for them. One click, Purchase With Facebook. The payment processing game is all about the network effect. Dwolla is innovative but they need an "eBay" for them to gain massive usage. Facebook doesn't need it.
Facebook can destroy eBay by creating a marketplace + their own payment processor. Facebook is the only company that can break eBay's monopoly of the online marketplace and payments. This field is ripe for disruption and in the game of network effect Facebook is unstoppable.
I can see them moving into enterprise too. Maybe teaming up with Micosoft's Office 365 to create an awesome enterprise social network with Office 365 built in.
Online gambling laws are starting to become loose. This can be huge for not only zynga but for many, many other massive companies who would love to use the social graph for the gambling. Example: BetFair and Bwin.
About your first part: I recently thought about a couple of app ideas that centered around integrating different web applications (facebook, dropbox, soundcloud, youtube).
One of the red flags was what you described. The external service providers can pull the plug whenever they want. They can steal your idea, they can charge you for using their API. Of course, if you are lucky they might buy you, but I don't foresee too many 1 billion dollar acquisitions from Facebook in the future.
I think charging for the API in inevitable.
As for stealing the idea. I personally never worry about people stealing my ideas because if an idea is good enough it will be stolen and copied %100.
Even if Facebook collapses, it doesn't mean it will take the rest of the web down with it. It just means that perhaps a place where you are shooting the breeze with your beer-drinking buddies isn't the best place to sell some, perhaps even most, goods and services. If that's the case, and the price for putting an ad on FB decreases, it doesn't following that the price for running an ad on another website will also be lower.
The author making the fundamental mistake of assuming that all web sites are the same, and that's obviously false. Just because Facebook is (in his view) a ad-supported website doesn't mean that it is interchangeable with any other ad-supported website.
> Even if Facebook collapses, it doesn't mean it will take the rest of the web down with it.
The WWW was here before Facebook. To even raise that possibility shows people completely lack a sense of proportion. Facebook and Google can disappear from the WWW and the WWW will stay there just like it was before these companies came along.
If Facebook collapses, sites that do semi-private chat with comments and images among groups of friends will rejoice. So will sites that allow you to create events and invite people to them.
It was a wrong move for Google to have gone into the social media business IMO. It took focus from their search, which has arguably lost quality, and injected search with too many diversions and "noise".
The level of interest in Google+ reflects "the fallacy of Facebook" as well, it is the same effect: why would people continue to expose themselves like that?
Social media with a purpose, like LinkedIn and similar, are good for business contacts. Facebook and Google+ simply aren't a business environment.
The purpose of Facebook and Google+ is to mine data and sell ads. IMO that is a broken business model, because at some point privacy will inevitably become a barrier.
This is why the Demand Media model (the massive production of content part) makes some sense.
Google wants publishers to make high quality content, but they don't understand that the ROI for that model is often piss poor, and very unfeasible for small, beginning publishers.
Thank you for saying this. As a small publisher myself, I am slowly being forced to go the Demand Media route, ever since I discovered that my articles earn about 1 dollar a piece. Got to get them done for less than that if I'm to stay in business.
Facebook has so many options:
E.g. Imagine you could also sell goods and open a shop on facebook. No need to leave facebook anymore, or visit another website on the web.
I think Facebook needs to get into the business of selling my data to companies I personally trust to have it.
Imagine letting me auction off my corner of the Facebook graph to companies that bid for it and I trust to sell it to. I get paid, Facebook gets a cut, and everybody is happy because I retain control over my data and the company who gets it knows they have a valuable, trusting customer and not just some apathetic eyeballs.
I don't think this is realistic at all, but it would be a way to calm privacy fears and revolutionize web advertising. As it is, most people I know just use adblock, because internet advertising is absolutely terrible. But -- and this is saying something from somebody like me who despises ads -- it doesn't have to be.
I wonder why no one mentions surveillance? Facebook may not be a perfect platform for advertising, but it is an awesome Big Br0 2.0. It's a lot more efficient and effective than anything that the N5A, C1A, or any other major intelligence agency have ever concocted directly. Like it or not, Facebook is here to stay. Whether it generates revenue from advertisers or governments is another story.
I strongly feel that C1SPA will be a strong part of Facebook's financial future.
The earth-changing idea is that we are all connected electronically by a few degrees. A lot of companies have tried this but Facebook has come the furthest.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadCompare HP, whose market cap is around 1/3 annual revenue at the moment.
Also you need to factor in that Amazon has about $25 billion in assets, so their net market cap is only about $75 billion. Anyone looking at Amazon's revenue growth and the diversified foundations of that company can't be too upset at the seemingly high P/E ratio of AMZN. Facebook is also growing revenue like crazy, but their market is much different and there are a lot of open questions on whether or not they can maintain that growth (or even retain their user base). That doesn't mean that facebook is a bad investment, it just means that there's a lot of risk there and the stock price doesn't seem to reflect any of that risk.
Consider: Yahoo has nearly as many users as Facebook (700 mil vs 900 mil), higher total revenue, just as many experienced developers, and a similar business model (ads). Almost all of facebook's valuation lies at the feet of their reputation, not at any sound business fundamentals, and that's a pretty big burden.
Yes, they may succeed, but pivots at that scale are risky, and there's no margin for risk built into the facebook share price. That's a problem.
Well that is like asking what comes next in the stock market. If anyone knows, then they're the next billionaires ;)
I don't know if Facebook will be a successful business, or if more convenient ways of communicating will appear in the future, but the ability to let me easily communicate with all my friends and family is as earth-changing as I'm going to need it.
If there's any element of this bubble that reminds me of the previous it is that there are still an awful lot of startups out there who are trying to simply acquire as many users as possible with vague plans to figure out how to make money later... and they all seem to come up with the same, "Uh... shove ads at them, I guess?" plan in the end.
But why were all these advertisers so willing to be wooed in the first place?
Because there's a very real (and growing) hole in the advertising landscape. With the erosion of TV advertising as a reliable way to generate mass impressions at scale, advertisers are anxious to find a replacement. TV is still the largest advertising vechicle, by media spend, for most F500 companies (if not all of them?). But premiums on TV are growing each year, even while total ratings are declining, audiences are dispersing (both across networks and onto other platforms), and ads are basically avoidable. While the bloom was on the Facebook rose, it seemed like a hell of a savior to people desperately seeking one.
The fallacy underpinning the leap from TV onto the Facebook bandwagon was the assumption that social media could be bought, and advertised on, in pretty much the same way as TV. In reality, the advertiser needs to be much more savvy and sophisticated about social advertising. He needs to worry about more than just reach, frequency, and CPMs. He'll need to consider the quality of his content, refresh rates for content, geo-targeting and context-targeting, the relevancy algorithms powering his anticipated reach and engagement figures, and the micro-segments to which he serves different ads at different times. Instead, right now he's spent the last few years simply throwing giant checks at Facebook and expecting TV reach, impressions, etc.
I'd consider both parties at fault here: the advertisers for being naive, and Facebook for playing to the deep-pocketed suckers. Picking the low-hanging fruit, in this case, may have set back Facebook's credibility within the advertising community for quite some time. And it also set expectations that Facebook wasn't, and still isn't, prepared to meet. (In fairness, I'm sure Facebook received a great deal of pressure to take the easy ad money in order to make its books look as attractive as possible in anticipation of the IPO).
So when I say we seem to be in an advertising bubble, it's not a statement that there isn't a revolution in advertising coming that somebody is going to profit from, it's a statement that it isn't coming at the pace people like Facebook are promising, nor can it sustain that level of investment profitably. I did make sure to call out Google for having legitimately advanced the field. If the bubble pops they'll get hit, but I have every confidence they'll survive and thrive, because they definitely have real value, just as Amazon has survived and thrived after the last bubble.
(I expect somewhere in the 5-15 years time frame there's going to be a robotics bubble too, and it won't be because robots that can coexist with us in our houses and streets won't be every bit as revolutionary as the hype claims, it just won't be revolutionary as quickly as the investment would require.)
I don't disagree.
"So when I say we seem to be in an advertising bubble, it's not a statement that there isn't a revolution in advertising coming that somebody is going to profit from, it's a statement that it isn't coming at the pace people like Facebook are promising, nor can it sustain that level of investment profitably."
Again, I think we're in complete agreement here.
"If the bubble pops they'll get hit, but I have every confidence they'll survive and thrive, because they definitely have real value, just as Amazon has survived and thrived after the last bubble."
True, which may actually make Google a fantastically cheap buy if the ad bubble pops and they take a momentary hit. Their fundamentals are solid and aren't going away anytime soon -- unless, of course, Facebook gets its act together and cannibalizes Google's ad dollars. While I think that's distinctly possible -- and Google has been anxious about it for years -- it seems that the threat isn't as immiment as once expected. The threat still exists, however. And maybe, in a weird way, the recent fiasco with Facebook's IPO will actually buy Facebook some "air cover" for awhile -- allowing it to develop killer ad products under the radar, surprising everyone with their rollout. (I think this must be the thesis of anyone still holding onto Facebook stock right now).
Here's how advertising works from its creator's point of view. There are a few principles abstract enough that you can apply to any piece of advertising. Good advertising positions itself within a market, develops a brand image, establishes its product as a good product (not even necessarily better-than: as long as you look trustworthy and people know your name, you'll sell). The bulk of ad research, meanwhile, goes into studying individual forms. TV ads. Product placement in films. Radio spots. Magazine spots. There's a series of long-tested techniques which advertisers rely on. Even these techniques usually fail, because plenty of advertisers are fucking idiots who don't get that ads are a creative medium, and if you're formulaic rather than creative, you'll sell jack shit.
The challenge of the Internet is that every web site has its own unique form. Most of these forms weren't even designed for ads (Facebook at least knew how they wanted to sell ads; Twitter still has no clue). To sell on Twitter is different from selling on Facebook is different from selling on Reddit or Tumblr or Pinterest or Instagram. There's no formula. And some of these sites are so limited that advertisers simply have no clue how to push their shitty little message out to suckers, ahem, consumers.
The fix, of course, is that instead of selling a brand you start interesting conversations, create dialogues that engage people with the thing you're selling, even start communities of people who revolve around your product. But advertisers aren't bright enough or genuine enough or ambitious enough to do this the right way. Community-building especially: nobody wants to join a forum for a product that isn't a car. Yet some people persist in thinking that if they build it, fans will come.
One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly. One's the model Facebook is still struggling with: connect super-small businesses with precisely the people who want to buy their product. These anti-Facebook ads stories recently only show that you have to be smarter advertising on Facebook than you'd have to be in a newspaper. The really good Facebook ads get friends talking about them, because they really are something that those people enjoy. But that runs counter to how advertisers think about their sheep, goddammit I mean targets, no wait that doesn't sound nice either.
The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people. That means fewer start-ups designed to sucker people into wanting some bullshit connection they never really needed (YC has some exactly like this), fewer advertisers looking down at the masses like they're ripe for the picking, fewer businesses geared toward herding people up and selling them wholesale. The more freedom you give people w/r/t how they consume media and how they express themselves, the harder it is to trap them in your crap. Ultimately it becomes more profitable to just treat them like human beings, and act like a human yourself. But plenty of products will die when this happens because plenty of products were never intended for human consumption in the first place.
Personally I think the problem isn't people doing an awful job, it's attention. On the TV they frequently interrupt your program but you'll endure it as the content is longer than the ad. Same with Radio. In Magazines and Papers they constantly jiggle around all the content so you have to at least scan the page to see if it's an advert or an article which means they have at least a chance to grab your attention.
Web ads cannot grab your attention because the content they surround is bite-sized so any attempt to interrupt is so much more jarring. They tried a few different ways and generally they failed. The worst new one is the put an ad in the middle of the text, but that too is incredibly jarring and confusing. Another example is the attempt to monetize funny videos by putting a 15 sec ad clip in front of it. But quite often this is as long as the content! Do people even try and endure the ad? I'd love to see the numbers. If I click play on a random video and an ad starts I usually skip to the next article rather than watch the ad.
Also when you get into something like Facebook the adverts sit in the same place every time. Which you learn to skip automatically very quickly as you're usually not interested in them. You never have to play hunt the article apart from the very occasional site that has the full page popups which generally means you will start avoiding that site.
But worse for advertisers, if they make them too intrusive people can just turn them off. Brilliant!
The only ad I've recently seen that made me think, hmm, this could work are the occasional full page background adverts they run on IMDB.
Also Facebook didn't used to have ads, they just added them to the side of the page at one point. And I doubt the future of ads does look like the Deck Network, it's just another advertising network. They seem to be teaching some strange ideas at your college, I'd be interested to see the data that backs it up.
I also think YouTube is onto something with the skippable ads. If the ad is interesting enough to catch your attention in the first 5 seconds, you watch it. Not very intrusive and an opportunity for me to watch a movie trailer and forces brands to do something super creative.
The comparison of Facebook ads (web ads in general) to newspapers competing for small local businesses is right on.
Doesn't seem so to me. I always run Adblock, but after looking around a bit at some DECK-served sites (there's a list on http://decknetwork.net/), I might whitelist their ads. They seem unobtrusive and mindfully-designed.
You seem to be saying that advertising networks could never work, but don't back that up with data (which, ironically, is what you're asking unalone for).
> the occasional full page background adverts they run on IMDB
I hate those. They ruin a consistent website experience, and then piss me off when I accidentally click the giant margins. The AV Club does this also - or used to, I don't know, I blocked 'em.
You started off by saying:
> I'd like to propose an alternative.
But never did so. What's the alternative?
I actually meant alternative explanation to the parent's observation that all advertisers seemingly have suddenly all become idiots.
It's based on the premise that you can auction off people's attention to the highest bidder. And to some degree yes, that still does work, a little. In the 21st century there are better ways. The best "advertising" is not recognizable as advertising at all. It's greasing the wheels of people buying something they already want. If you look at amazon, for example, they have the recommendations system, an extensive product review system, and a referral system. All of these are there to help guide people into buying something. Amazon is best served when a customer buys something they actually want, as is google. It strengthens their brand and deepens user engagement. This is precisely what facebook needs to be doing but haven't, partly because unlike with google, any degree of advertising is intrusive on the experience of using facebook. And if they get into the cycle of just dumping more and more generic, "attention auction" ads on their users then they will have failed. People will merely ignore the ads or they will spend their time elsewhere if the site becomes too obnoxious to use.
Nothing in your essay has anything to do with advertising not being a bubble. Sure, it depends on your definition of "bubble," but in the sense that I imagine most people understand it (over-hyped marketplaces leading to inflated, unsustainable valuations), you didn't refute nor address the concept at all.
In fact, a lot of your post could be used to support jerf's point. The methodologies that you're saying are worthless actually have huge advertising budgets behind them. Inflated value over true, intrinsic value = bubble.
Also, this statement:
>> "One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly."
This goes without saying, but click's aren't the intrinsic value of ads. There has to be a transaction at some point for the value to be justified from the advertisers standpoint. It's actually pretty ironic that in your shining example about advertising's golden future, you stop short of the true value of advertising.
>>"The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people."
?
i was recently at a party, near Vienna, Austria. lots of thirty somethings, all educated, various jobs.
i asked a simple question: has anyone of you clicked on a digital ad? ever?
no one. now, of course, sample size, anecdote, yaddayadda. i never clicked on an ad (hell, i block them). no one i know clicks on them. the only time people really get "engaged" by an ad is when it is annoying - everyone has a hateful story about those.
is there really tangible, hard evidence that online ads lead to actual sales? and if so, who the heck are the people actually clicking on them?
So let's see, out of 4 people, only me who did not click the ads.
Minority.
Not the annoying ones mind you, it your ad interrupts me, you deserve to be punished. My time is precious to me.
However, if your ad just sits there, off to the side or at the top of the page or whatever (or off-web, in a billboard, or poster or display at the store, whatever) I'm ok with it. See, what that does it notify me of the existence of things. Many of those things are actually useful to my life. By keeping me up to date of what exists, I can be far more efficient when it comes time to deal with problems, wants and needs. In the least useful case, I can at least know who does the things I am looking to get done. In the most useful case, I will be aware that there are tools to solve a problem I may have otherwise spent days on (or even given up on solving and worked around). This saves me time and effort. I am OK with that. Seriously, how else would I go about finding something I didn't know existed without tons of effort otherwise -- I probably wouldn't even know to look for it.
I really don't understand the anti-ad people. Oh no! Someone is trying to sell you something... the horror. Oh no, you haven't spent 30s teaching yourself to not be distracted by something shiny, way to waste your human capability to learn.
It regularly turns out on google that the ad links are exactly what I am looking to buy, so I click and give everyone the conversion, because honestly, it doesn't hurt me to do so, and keeps this amazingly useful tool that is "good search" available to me at no additional cost.
Whatever, I'm probably below average intelligence, and am one of the dumb folks that doesn't magically understand every single thing in existence via pure thought, and must be informed instead.
Yes, 20 and 30 somethings click on ads all the time, but they tend not to look like ads. Ads that come up in google searches are typically highly relevant, so plenty of people click on them. And various forms of advertisement such as amazon referral links and such-like which represent buying suggestions from trusted friends.
Also, if you have to be smarter to effectively advertise on Facebook, isn't that a sign that they are charging too much?
I'm excited at the possibilities that will arise after the fall of Facebook and the decline of web advertising.
If you own a small business, for instance, it's incredibly gratifying to hear ads for your business on the radio. It makes you feel good about yourself. It makes it hard to make a rational calculation that spending $X on ads brings in $Y more profit, and that $Y > $X. Even if you're rational, there's some other guy who's not who is going to drive up rates.
Many big companies spend heavily, even buy TV networks, so they can bombard the public with "feel good" messages that don't have a clear role in a conversion funnel. For instance, GE bought NBC and you can't go five minutes without seeing some ad trying to convince people that GE is this great innovative company trying to save the Earth -- although generally the products involved aren't for retail sale and the only rational purpose for these ads, at best, is an effort to influence the political climate. What's the ROI on that?
Google ads have started to puncture this bubble because once you have advertising that's measurable, it's hard to justify the expense for something that's not.
I'd go a step beyond that and say if there is any bubble, it is based on a large number of people targeting market share of a market with a fairly constant size, advertising spend.
Everytime you add a company trying to get advertising dollars, those dollars have to come from some other company and making advertising more efficient doesn't nessisarily mean Cheif Marketing Officers will increase marketing spend.
Google isn't ASS, because Google ads aren't really ads. They're more like the shelf slots that Safeway sells to food vendors. Google is a store - the world's biggest store, browsed by full-text search.
(In fact, if I was Goog, I'd separate the UI into two intents, with a radiobutton or something: either you're shopping, or you're searching for information. The latter is a free, spamless service that supports the former.)
I think FB will have to learn to make its money the old-fashioned way - by providing valuable services. FB is a valuable service - it makes $5 per user a year, from ads. How many FB users would drop the service if they had to pay $5 a year? And how many other services can FB add? Dropbox anyone? Dropbox isn't ASS...
Advertising is a crappy way of funding services. It chiefly exists because of payment friction. Startups are supposed to be the future. Is crap the future? Is your project ASS? Great, but have a plan to exit before the ASS bubble pops. Some of us remember the first era of "eyeball valuation"...
Once it became possible to measure the effectiveness of transactional ads online, it became a lot harder to justify the cost of display ads.
The advertising apocalypse won't just affect the internet, it will affect traditional media. On the few cases where I watch cable or OTA TV I'm shocked that the ads are 5-10% relevant to me -- it seems like much of the industry is kept alive by ambulance-chasing lawyers, credit repair services and the medicare economy.
(2) Facebook has other ways to make money, and in a pinch, they'll develop them -- it's believable that they could increase revenue 2-3x in a year or two if they really had to... Largely because they haven't had intense pressure to increase revenue. Facebook Credits, for instance, could be a gold mine if you could buy more things with them.
Am I the only one that finds this hard to believe? Why is Facebook in a good position to authorize payments? They have very few credit cards on file. Besides FarmVille, et al, who exactly is giving their credit card info to Facebook?
In what context am I supposed to use Facebook to pay for things? If we're talking about mobile, then we're talking about smartphones. What exactly makes you think Google/Apple are going to lay down and give the keys to the mobile payment castle to Facebook? Google and Apple already have our credit card info, we all already buy things through Apple and Google, and it is a logical step that I would use that same process for buying something with my smartphone in a store.
I don't think it is a logical step for me to pull out my smartphone, open my Facebook app and use it to pay for something, anymore than it makes sense to use my Twitter app to pay, or Instagram for that matter.
In fact, if we're going to use a third party app to pay for things, I have an app from my bank, why not use that?
I just don't see Facebook getting in to mobile payments...
You're going to use your bank for payments because you already have low-cost ways to make payments already (ie. checks, debit and credit cards).
But... there are millions of people in the US who operate outside of the banking system. They are mostly poor or working off the books in some form. For these folks, the idea of buying a $100 topoff card at a gas station to have access to mobile payments makes sense. How do I know this? Becuase the same folks are paying $5 for a disposable debit card today.
If I'm paying a friend, why not use PayPal, or Bump, or just cash?
As far as Facebook being trusting in terms of commerce, well... I don't buy it.
http://threatmetrix.com/study-reveals-only-a-quarter-of-cons...
Also - anyone remember Facebook Marketplace? Me neither. It's been stagnating for years.
Payments is an amazing opportunity for them. One click, Purchase With Facebook. The payment processing game is all about the network effect. Dwolla is innovative but they need an "eBay" for them to gain massive usage. Facebook doesn't need it.
Facebook can destroy eBay by creating a marketplace + their own payment processor. Facebook is the only company that can break eBay's monopoly of the online marketplace and payments. This field is ripe for disruption and in the game of network effect Facebook is unstoppable.
I can see them moving into enterprise too. Maybe teaming up with Micosoft's Office 365 to create an awesome enterprise social network with Office 365 built in.
Online gambling laws are starting to become loose. This can be huge for not only zynga but for many, many other massive companies who would love to use the social graph for the gambling. Example: BetFair and Bwin.
One of the red flags was what you described. The external service providers can pull the plug whenever they want. They can steal your idea, they can charge you for using their API. Of course, if you are lucky they might buy you, but I don't foresee too many 1 billion dollar acquisitions from Facebook in the future.
The author making the fundamental mistake of assuming that all web sites are the same, and that's obviously false. Just because Facebook is (in his view) a ad-supported website doesn't mean that it is interchangeable with any other ad-supported website.
The WWW was here before Facebook. To even raise that possibility shows people completely lack a sense of proportion. Facebook and Google can disappear from the WWW and the WWW will stay there just like it was before these companies came along.
56? Profit-to-earnings?
The level of interest in Google+ reflects "the fallacy of Facebook" as well, it is the same effect: why would people continue to expose themselves like that?
Social media with a purpose, like LinkedIn and similar, are good for business contacts. Facebook and Google+ simply aren't a business environment.
The purpose of Facebook and Google+ is to mine data and sell ads. IMO that is a broken business model, because at some point privacy will inevitably become a barrier.
Google wants publishers to make high quality content, but they don't understand that the ROI for that model is often piss poor, and very unfeasible for small, beginning publishers.
Imagine letting me auction off my corner of the Facebook graph to companies that bid for it and I trust to sell it to. I get paid, Facebook gets a cut, and everybody is happy because I retain control over my data and the company who gets it knows they have a valuable, trusting customer and not just some apathetic eyeballs.
I don't think this is realistic at all, but it would be a way to calm privacy fears and revolutionize web advertising. As it is, most people I know just use adblock, because internet advertising is absolutely terrible. But -- and this is saying something from somebody like me who despises ads -- it doesn't have to be.
I strongly feel that C1SPA will be a strong part of Facebook's financial future.